Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Revised Edition)

by James Gunn

  A.: You're right, you leave me nothing to say, because I agree with you completely there.

  Gunn: As a matter of fact in the third volume of Road to Science Fiction I reprinted the story "Reason." Like you I delight in puns and I called the biographical headnote "The Clear, Cool Voice of Asimov."

  I have read virtually all the science fiction you have ever published. I wonder whether the reason the stories in The Early Asimov were not included in your other anthologies was that they were in some way inferior they didn't live up to your vision of what they might have been. It seemed to me that at some point you discovered that you liked to incorporate in your stories an element of mystery and suspense. I wondered whether you would feel it to be a fair statement that when your stories began to really incorporate not just detective elements, but always a kind of mystery to be discovered, this was really when your fiction began to please you, and began to be successful in your own eyes.

  A.: Well, now that's very interesting, because I think perhaps you're right. Certainly the first stories that really satisfied me and made me feel good about my writing were my robot stories, and the robot stories, of course, virtually every one of them, had a situation in which robots which couldn't go wrong did go wrong. And we had to find out what had gone wrong, how to correct it within the absolute limits of the three laws. This was just the sort of thing I loved to do. And I enjoyed it.

  Gunn: And so when you began to write mysteries science fiction stories as mysteries it was really nothing new because you had really being doing this all along with the robot stories, except they weren't presented as detective stories there was no formal detective, but Susan Calvin was doing the job of a detective.

  A.: Yes, that's right. And then by the time I got to The Caves of Steel, there was a robot story in which the detective element was formal. And I did the same with The Naked Sun and then it was just natural progression to go to straight mysteries. Which I now enjoy more than I do science fiction it is as though I've discovered what I really like and I can do that even without the science fiction. And, incidentally, this is very old-fashioned. People don't do it anymore even the mysteries, the straight mysteries I write are extremely old-fashioned and I suspect that if I weren't me I couldn't sell them. And this is another thing that constantly puzzles me about my own writing and I hate to talk about it too much for fear that someone else will see that. But to put it as briefly as I can how do I get away with it? Because, when I wrote Murder at the ABA, for instance, even on the book jacket, it said "an old-fashioned mystery" and I thought, gee, there's the kiss of death. Who's going to read an old-fashioned mystery? Well, enough people read it so that it was reasonably successful. And now my autobiography is, if ever I saw one, an old-fashioned autobiography, because there are no sexual revelations in it there are no deep psychological probings. I don't have any sensational revelations whatsoever. It's just the ordinary story of an ordinary life and yet it's doing fairly well.

  Gunn: Maybe it's because you have an insight into publishing some publishers don't have, that people have always been willing to read old-fashioned works. There may be a basic kind of appeal there that the publishers are overlooking.

  A.: Well, that could be. In any case, fortunately, my publishers are very pleasant to me and usually let me have my way, in sort of a very fatherly way. You know that's another place where I have been extremely fortunate. Campbell took what I consider to have been a fatherly interest in me. He had a number of writers who came to visit him periodically or corresponded with him and discussed with them in those late 30s and early 40s that first five years in which he was editor, which were the most creative of all. And I think that of all the writers I was the youngest, in years, and still young in outlook. I was naive, unsophisticated, and therefore somehow he felt that I was most malleable, and the most easily molded, and he enjoyed molding me, so to speak. And he was in loco parentis he was a father in almost everything but the literal sense of the word, and literally he was a father. And this somehow has been the same attitude that, to a somewhat lesser extent, all my editors, virtually all, have since taken to me, even when, as in recent years, they've turned out to be, say, twenty years younger than I was. Right now my Doubleday editor is a young woman named Kathleen Jordan, who is approximately a quarter-century younger than I am. And yet her attitude toward me is distinctly motherly. I have the feeling in fact it is not something I really had to dig for, because it's quite open and obvious on the surface that she's out there making sure that I don't fall over my own big feet, you know, and she won't let me do things that I shouldn't, because she says no, I'm not going to let you, Isaac, and I know she worries about me. So, I suppose I could say that by the most peculiar coincidence something like a dozen editors with whom I've been close in books and magazines have all just happened to be the fatherly the parental type. But I don't think that that is conceivable. I think that rather what it is that for some darn reason I inspire this in other people, I think largely because I am quite obviously naive and unsophisticated. (Laughter). I don't really think that I am, but that's how I must impress others.

  Gunn: To get back for a moment to this question about the mysteries, it seems to me as I look over the stories that there are a couple of basic ways in which one can deal with characters in a story. They can either have a problem to solve or else they themselves can change and in your stories, few of your characters change you talked about that in your 1953 essay "Social Science Fiction," that people are pretty much the same they don't change, the circumstances change. And of them all, I can only think of one Asimov story where a person changes and that's probably "The Ugly Little Boy." This is probably one of the few stories there may be one or two others which might be called "stories of character." And I wonder whether you ever felt that or ever were aware of the fact that one could deal with stories of character, even within science fiction or thought of it in those terms?

  A.: Well, I knew that it could be done. I also knew well that it might be too difficult for me to do. I don't know that I have the kind of literary power that is required for that sort of thing. I can deal with rational action, but I'm not sure that I can deal with the inner recesses of being. Now "The Ugly Little Boy" was something I had written on a dare. No one had made it to me, I made it to myself. I got tired of having people tell me that I had no women in my stories. That's true, I rarely have women in my stories, and that's a matter of choice I'm not at ease with women in my stories, largely because I started writing long before I'd had so much as a date with a girl. Women were strangers and aliens to me and I never quite got over that. Even though in real life they are no longer strangers and aliens. But I got tired of hearing people say that, and so, to show myself, I decided to write a story in which a woman was the chief character, but not a woman like Susan Calvin, who is rationality personified, but a woman with emotions. So I sat down to do that, and that's what came out. It's not necessarily what I planned it just worked itself out that way. It's one of the few stories I've written that routinely makes women cry. At least I've received phone calls and letters from people saying that they've read "The Ugly Little Boy" and it made them cry at the end and invariably I answer and say I am pleased because it made me cry when I wrote it which it did. The only other story I've ever written in which I felt that I was deliberately, more or less, reaching for the pocket handkerchief at the end was "The Bicentennial Man," where that, too although I didn't plan it! is a story of character because Andrew, the robot, develops all the way through. He not only forces recognition of himself as a man that is the external change but all through internally he becomes more and more of a man. So, there again I did it. So, I suppose I can do it. I can do it, but I don't necessarily tend to, because what I concentrate on mostly is the problem.

  Gunn: The puzzle, the mystery?

  A.: Yes.

  Gunn: You've often said that you don't know much about writing and I wonder, if I may say so, if this isn't a pose, a bit disingenuous?

  (Asimov
laughing) Because clearly you have thought about it and you've attended the Bread Loaf Conference and they must have talked about things which I'm sure did not go over your head. And you've mentioned the incident in which you noticed how Clifford Simak left gaps in his stories to indicate a change of place or action. First you thought that was offensive and then you realized that this was a good thing to do and so you learned how to do it yourself. You have picked up things and I just wonder whether you think a little bit more about this than your public pose would suggest.

  A.: Well, now, that's really hard to say. I swear to you that I don't deliberately set up a pose it's what I tend to think. There was a book recently called Isaac Asimov a collection of essays about me edited by Martin Greenberg and Joseph Olander, and I wrote an appendix called "Asimov on Asimov" in which I first denied that it was at all possible that I could possibly have inserted all that meaning in my stories, and then I presented the opposite view that maybe I could, at that, without even knowing it. So that it's possible that consciously I don't think much about the mechanics of writing. I don't sit down and brood about it or try to think it out or discuss it with people, but that without very much in the way of conscious thinking I manage to learn from what I read and from what I hear. For instance, I remember distinctly reading once that you have written that it is necessary to engage several of the senses. And whenever I can remember, I try to do so, you see? But it's very difficult for me to remember in the fury of composition.

  Gunn: The first time I learned that I put the five senses up in front of my typewriter so that I would be reminded (laughter). Carolyn Gordon taught me that a number of years ago. In Donald Wollheim's book The Universe Makers, he speculates that psychohistory is the science that Marxism pretended to be and I wondered whether you ever consciously thought about that in that relationship.

  A.: Well . . . you know that's so difficult to answer because psychohistory originated in a discussion between myself and Campbell, as so many of the things in my early science fiction stories did. And I think Campbell must have been reading about symbolic logic at the time. There is some reference to symbolic logic in the first story and that was more or less forced on me by John Campbell; it didn't come naturally to me, because I knew nothing about symbolic logic. And he felt in our discussion that symbolic logic, further developed, would so clear up the mysteries of the human mind as to leave human actions predictable. The reason human beings are so unpredictable was we didn't really know what they were saying and thinking because language is generally used obscurely. So what we needed was something that would unobscure the language and leave everything clear. Well, this I didn't believe, so I made it mathematical and my analogy was, of course, to the kinetic theory of gases, where the individual molecules in the gas remain as unpredictable as ever, but the average action is completely predictable, so that what we needed were two things, a lot of people, which the galactic empire supplied, and secondly, people not knowing what the conclusions were as to the future so that they could continue to act randomly. And that's the way it worked out. Now, when Wollheim says that it was what Marxism pretended to be, well when Wollheim was young he was very interested in Marxism and undoubtedly read a lot about it. I've never read anything about it, you see, so it's a case of his reading his bent into me. For me, it was the kinetic theory of gases and that was secondarily imposed and it was John Campbell who really started it with symbolic logic.

  Gunn: At that time you may not have been aware of H.G. Wells' talk to the Sociological Society in which he said that a true science of sociology was impossible because there aren't enough people involved to make accurate prediction possible.

  A.: No, this is the first I heard of it.

  Gunn: You weren't aware of it?

  A.: No, not until now I haven't been aware of it. (Laughter)

  Gunn: There is a kind of parallel in that obviously I say obviously, it is obvious now obviously in the Foundation stories you supplied enough people so that the laws of physics can be applied to those numbers. H.G. Wells said there wasn't enough people to apply these kinds of laws to, so he suggested that sociology really ought to be concerned with a kind of setting down of utopian visions of the future and sociologists would then criticize them and judge whether they would work. As a matter of fact there is another parallel your autobiography brings out: Wells wrote in his autobiography that he was very much at home in biology because he took his first year at the Normal School of Science under T.H. Huxley. It was a shaping experience for him. His second year I believe was in chemistry, and it was OK, but he didn't have as good a teacher and his studies went downhill. His third year was in geology and was a total loss, and physics he knew nothing at all about, and of course he was great at history as you are. And almost the same kinds of parallels, it seems to me, were evident in your own interests in your college educational career. You have indicated that the higher mathematics stumped you eventually when you got up to the upper reaches of calculus and physics was not really your field.

  A.: No.

  Gunn: I wondered if there is some similarity, not in the careers themselves, but simply in the kinds of minds that were involved.

  A.: Well, since I'm a great admirer of H.G. Wells, I find this funny. (Laughter)

  Gunn: To go back to The Foundation Trilogy, I am curious at what point in the whole series did the concept of the Second Foundation occur?

  A.: Well, from the very start

  Gunn: Right from the first conversations with Campbell?

  A.: Right, because I remember Campbell saying we'll need two foundations.

  Gunn: Because it's never mentioned in the first foundation series it's mentioned in the introductory story that you wrote for the Gnome Press edition, but as I recall, and I could be wrong, I didn't see any mention of a second foundation until we get into the second volume.

  A.: Well, it's my impression, and I swear, I can't say for sure, that in the very first story, "Foundation," there was a casual mention of the Second Foundation, because it was there from the beginning. [Asimov was right. J.G.] I did not know what the function of the Second Foundation was to be. It was there as a safety measure, as a reserve, as a strategic reserve, in case something developed in the plot so that I needed a way out, that would be the Second Foundation. And as a matter of fact, it became necessary once we introduced the Mule. Now the Mule was introduced by Campbell over my virtually dead body which was in a sense a good thing it was one of the many occasions in which Campbell was right and I was wrong and I never try to hide those occasions. He wanted to upset the plan and I thought that was heresy. He said to me don't worry, think of all the fun you'll have trying to get it back on the track. And so I remember distinctly saying to myself, well if he's going to make me destroy the plan, the only way I could get back at him was to write the longest story I had written up to that time, and I did; I wrote 50,000 words. I'd never written a 50,000 word story before and he was glad to pay for it. Of course, it was the best piece, it was the best thing in The Foundation Trilogy.

  Gunn: You make the comment in your autobiography that he made you change the ending of "Now You See It . . . ," the sequel to "The Mule."

  A.: Yes.

  Gunn: To permit the continuation of the series. But you don't say what your ending was.

  A.: I don't remember I don't remember.

  Gunn: Oh, I see. . . . (Laughter) You don't remember how you were going to end it. Maybe the Mule wins out maybe he was going to find the Second Foundation?

  A.: No, no I was going to reveal what the Second Foundation was and have the Second Foundation triumphant as it was, but reveal where it was and no more. But I don't remember where I had said it was, that's the point, and Campbell made me take it out, because he wasn't going to let me finish, and then I wrote one more and after that nothing on earth could have made me continue; it just got too heavy.

  Gunn: Yet, in many ways the last book, Second Foundation, may be liked better by a lot of people because of the character of
the girl.

  A.: Yes, yes, Arkady, she was good. It was the only time I ever tried extended treatment of a teenage girl and I enjoyed that very much. It was not that I couldn't write more about the Foundation, it was that the situation under which I wrote it, individual stories in magazines in which each one had to be self-contained where you have to assume that it was quite possible that somebody was going to start reading it that hadn't read any of the other Foundation stories you had to explain everything that went before it just got so hard. Now if I had written it in novel form, so that instead of having eight stories of different length I had three novels as a trilogy, I could undoubtedly have had a fourth one.